My Reflections Towards the Path to Greatness

Recently, I've been contemplating what the best path to achieving greatness really is, especially after seeing people succeed in so many different ways. Greatness is not necessarily the path towards becoming a multi-millionaire, but it is a path towards doing work that matters and making a difference in the world. A lot of people believe that gaining capital as early and as much as possible is probably the best policy in life. It's no wonder, then, that many of my smart friends aim for internships or full time position at quant companies. Some succeed and end up earning insane amounts of money (for context, the highest salary I know of is around $200k/year even for interns, crazy, I know). Sometimes that makes me envious and reflect on my convictions, and for the 1000th time people would ask me: "why don't you try going for it too?" With my background of winning multiple national and international Math and Coding Olympiads, I'm confident that if I dedicated 2-3 years to focused preparation, I could probably excel at the types of questions and interviews given by quant companies, and potentially have a decent chance of getting in. (I hope this does not come off as bragging, as I only intend to use this for my argument) But then another part of me starts to question: Would that really be the best path for me? Is that really what I want? For one, I'm not particularly interested in the work quants do. Personally, I don't think it contributes to society in a very meaningful way.…